Space station crew prepares to return to Earth on Russian
ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) — An American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut on Monday spent the final hours of their nearly six-month tour on the International Space Station preparing for a lightning journey back to Earth inside the wingless Russian spacecraft filling in for the United States’ grounded shuttle fleet.
It will be only the second time that a U.S. astronaut comes home in a Russian craft and lands on foreign soil. Space officials are hoping for less drama Tuesday than the nerve-racking landing in May, when a computer error sent the Soyuz’ American and Russian crew on a wild descent 400 kilometers (250 miles) off-course.
American astronaut Ed Lu, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and the station’s eight-day visitor, Spanish astronaut Pedro Duque, are scheduled to thump down in the barren and sparsely-populated north-central Kazakh steppe at 05:41 Moscow time (0241 GMT) Tuesday.
Lu and Malenchenko are to arrive home in the same Russian Soyuz that propelled them into orbit nearly six months ago, demonstrating NASA’s full dependence on Russia — from launch to landing — to keep its astronauts flying.
“This essentially completes a cycle of Russia being able to launch our crews to continue a manned presence on the space station,” said NASA spokesman Rob Navias in the Kazakh capital, Astana.
Russian aerospace engineers said there was only a slim chance that this crew would suffer from the same computer malfunction that sent the station’s previous inhabitants on such a steep trajectory home that their tongues rolled back in their mouths. The May landing was so far off-target that more than two gut-wrenching hours passed before rescuers knew the men were safe.
“There is very little probability of another ballistic landing,” said Gen. Vladimir Popov, who heads the team responsible for Russia’s space search and rescue operations. “But we must be prepared for any variant, and we are.”
Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic, agreed to a Russian request to close off a wider swathe of airspace than previously, said Mikhail Zotov, the search and rescue spokesman. Rescue crews will fly from three locations instead of one to cover all the possible landing spots, he said.
Thirteen helicopters, four planes and numerous off-terrain vehicles will take part in the operation. The search teams will include flight surgeons from NASA and the European Space Agency.
Additionally, this Soyuz is equipped with satellite phones and a global positioning satellite system, courtesy of NASA. So if the crew does land off-course and communications systems are damaged as happened in May, they should still be able to pinpoint and phone in their location.
The rocky May landing came just three months after Columbia broke apart during re-entry, killing all seven astronauts. A Russian commission concluded that the Soyuz’ guidance system malfunctioned, causing the capsule to revert to a steep landing that subjected the crew to roughly eight times the force of gravity.
“This Soyuz is still technically susceptible to the same type of problem but the Russians believe they understand it well enough and they’ve trained the crew … so they can possibly do something manually to override the computer,” Navias said.
(mb/ji)